


hail to the kings of the ruckus

by Thorinsmut



Category: Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: (also lots of regular dismemberment), Animal Death, Arson, Body Horror, Butcher!Roadhog, Cannibalism, Child Death, Complete, Corpse Eating, Dead Dove: Do Not Eat, Demon Summoning, Demon!Junkrat, Explosions, Eye Trauma, Gore, Hayseed!Junkrat - Freeform, Horror, M/M, Paranoia, Possession, Self Harm, Suicide, Transformation, demon!Roadhog, don't get attached to anyone they're all going to die, human death, no happy ending, rated e for violence, romantic dismemberment, the demons win, this is the fic equivalent of a slasher flick
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-01
Updated: 2020-10-31
Packaged: 2021-03-07 22:15:18
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 11
Words: 20,441
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26754916
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Thorinsmut/pseuds/Thorinsmut
Summary: It begins with blood and fire.So, too, shall it end.
Relationships: Junkrat/Roadhog
Comments: 66
Kudos: 33





	1. the summons

**Author's Note:**

> **!!! PLEASE MIND THE WARNINGS ON THIS FIC !!!**  
>  Hey folks, this one is very much _not_ like my usual fare. So if you're looking at it thinking, "Well, normally I wouldn't read a fic like this but I trust TS to treat the subject matter with care." No! Do not trust me! Zero things are treated with care here. This fic is exactly what it says on the tin. It is violent and awful and has no redeeming features.  
> Please treat yourselves gently,  
> <3  
> TS

It begins like this.

Three summoners, above the age of reason, gathered in a weedy patch of woods as midnight arrives to herald in the tenth month. A time of cold frost, of red leaves; a time death, and of change.

Mary is a holy name, but Mary Mary quite contrary told her friends to call her Mara. Mara, bitter on the tongue and bitter in her heart. There is no nurture in the breast of Mara. The nails on her hands are long and red, and not content to bear the vessel, it is her hand that holds the runed knife.

Leonard the clever, the scholar, the inventor, the shunned. Unparalleled in understanding, but Leonard, Leonard, he has not the lion's heart of his name. He is swayed by the people he thinks of as his friends, his pain so easily twisted toward violence. Leonard holds the vessel, pretty silver bowl stolen from his grandmother's china cabinet, in shaking hands.

Belial. How does one describe John who secretly calls himself Belial? Oh, soft insistent words that drive Leonard and Mara away from anyone else and toward him. Oh, sharp eyes that see only cruelty, keen ears that hear only ill. Oh, the souring of a soul that delights in only suffering. Oh Belial, with a thousand real and imagined slights tallied up in his heart, with no kindnesses counted to balance the scale. Belial eagerly holds the black rabbit—struggling—in place on the rough stone they chose as an altar.

Three summoners, old enough to know better, but young enough still to be rash.

It begins like this: the rabbit dies with more scream than blood, but _enough_ blood, caught in the silver bowl. Its heart is cut out, and placed still warm in the chest of a ragged scarecrow. A glowing coal from the small charcoal grill they used for a brazier is placed in the scarecrow's rough-sewn burlap mouth.

Tongues anointed with fresh blood, the summoners speak their spell. Seven repetitions of the profane words in the dark. The coal, nestled in the hay of the scarecrow, crackles, smokes, begins to faintly pulse with heat in time with the spoken syllables. The dry hay catches, one little lick of flame, and then a second, and then faster than if it were doused in gasoline the gangly scarecrow bursts into an inferno. The lifeless little rabbit heart, wreathed in flames, sizzles and burns.

The blinding white-hot blaze of fire dies nearly as quickly. The summoners rub at their streaming eyes as they look with fear and hope toward the scarecrow. The flames flicker, guttering out into black char and red glowing coals. Slowly, the scarecrow's right arm, untouched by the fire, breaks off and rolls away.

There is no other motion, only silence. Belial turns his gaze to Leonard, rage burning up hot in his chest at having been duped with a spell that did not work.

A rabbit's heart is a weak little thing, if it comes from a pampered house pet that never had to run to survive. A weak little heart, but quick and full of energetic potential. Deep within the chest of the charred scarecrow, the charred heart pulses, pumping ash and smoke and a tiny seed of the pure chaos energy of the demon the summoners called.

The smoldering scarecrow sits up.

Belial's fury turns immediately to excitement, he kicks Leonard three times quickly to make him begin the next part.

Scrambling, flinching, Leonard grabs the dead rabbit and places it on the charcoals in the makeshift brazier. "Oh child of chaos, we bring you this sacrifice and an offer," he says, voice shaking. The rabbit sizzles on the coals, a great gout of the foul smoke of burning hair billowing up and surrounding them.

Mara speaks her part next, loud and clear. "We offer you this body and the name of Hayseed for one month."

("You should do the second part," Leonard had told her, as they planned. "You'll be strongest for it, because... uh, you know. Girls and months?" And Mara had punched him hard in the arm and grumbled how 'that woo woo sacred womb crap is total bullshit', but accepted the part in exchange for wielding the knife instead of the vessel for the sacrifice.)

Belial's palms sweat in eagerness, cock half-hardened in his jeans as he thinks of the violence Hayseed might enact on their behalf. "In exchange for revenge against everyone who's wronged us," he concludes.

Hayseed inhales, sucking the foul smoke in through the burnt-burlap mouth. The smoke swirls, filling in the gaps in the patchy scarecrow body, but leaving it still a skeletal figure of ash and burnt straw. He laughs, a high tittering giggle, as he crawls to crouch over the brazier—knobby knees sticking up higher than his shoulders.

"Deal," he agrees, in a screechy and unpleasant voice, and buries his face in the grill, crunching up burning coals and scorched rabbit alike.

The summoners leave him there. They leave floating high on their success, wondering who to aim their pet demon at first.

"He's not going to be very strong," Leonard cautions Belial and Mara. "This was just a test, remember? We'd need a heart a lot stronger than a _rabbit's_ to get a really powerful demon."

"Yeah, yeah, egghead," Mara says, and grabs his face between her red-clawed and bloodied hands to lick a smear of drying blood from his chin, and releases him, laughing. It is not meant as a kiss, Leonard does not enjoy it and Mara does not mean him to—but on the list in Belial's heart it is counted as both a passionate kiss and a personal betrayal by them both.

Alone in the weedy patch of woods, Hayseed giggles quietly to himself, slurping up ruptured rabbit guts like spaghetti, goggled eyes glowing like coals in the dark.

It begins like this, with blood and fire.

So, too, shall it end.


	2. testing the waters

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> it begins

The first week of October, and it begins like this:

Old Mrs. Harrison's dog won't stop barking.

The dog in question is old, a grizzled and half-blind peka-something that loves nothing in the world besides Mrs. Harrison. Anyone else is liable to get their ankles bitten if they venture into its yard (uncommon) or the dog gets loose (all too frequent). It had chased Leonard all the way down the block once, torn the bottom hem of Mara's jeans because she refused to run, and been kicked in the face by Belial twice. Once, Old Mrs. Harrison saw him do it, and she screamed down half the neighborhood as she called him a delinquent and a psychopath and threatened him with the police.

It was nothing Belial did not call himself, and proudly, in the confines of his own head. Still, it had been embarrassing, and if there was one thing in the world Belial could not stomach it was embarrassment. She'd called his father, too, and he'd gotten a second talking-to at home.

None of the three summoners _like_ Old Mrs. Harrison and her vicious little dog, but Belial hates her with a pure and undying hatred.

Old Mrs. Harrison's dog won't stop barking, driven into a frenzy by half-seen shadows, strange scents and stranger movements that no one else seems to see.

The neighbors three houses around curse her and her dog's names both as they try and block the sound out.

After she goes to bed, Jenny Turner is unsettled by strange whispery scratching outside her bedroom window. She tries to tell herself that it's just the wind, just the wind in the branches of the old tree that grows beside the house. She loves that tree. It's great for climbing in the summer. At the moment there's a late nest of collared doves visible from the window, and she's been eagerly watching the ugly little squabs grow and feather out. They're nearly fledged.

But the happy thoughts don't help Jenny tune the sound out. She can't calm herself down, and sleep eludes her for most of the night.

Jenny Turner is a popular girl in school. She gets good grades by studying hard, and she's conventionally pretty, and she expresses interest all the right things the right amount. By all measures, she's a nice girl, if quite skilled at the kind of backhanded cruelty needed to come out on top in the cutthroat politics of High School.

Mara privately thinks she's a stuck-up bitch, but as Mara has never been the target of her cruelty, she doesn't much care. Belial envies her popularity. Leonard, though. Oh, Leonard. He harbored a crush on her for two years after she was assigned as his lab partner once in biology. He never approached her. He never tried to get to know her as a friend, much less date her.

There was no possible way Jenny could have known he was interested, to turn him down or take him up on it, but Leonard took the fact that she did not fall into his arms anyway _personally_. He resents her, and her lighthearted smile, and her beauty, with a seething, roiling bitterness.

The glass of Jenny's window rattles in the pane, like someone trying to pry it up from the outside. There are long, slow, diamond-on-glass scrape. The moonlight shadows on her bedroom wall look like monstrous shapes looming over her. Jenny shivers beneath the covers and tells herself that it's _nothing_.

Mr. Kelly wakes up in the night, drenched in sweat, with a sense of dread hanging over him. He feels a great weight on his chest, a heaviness in his limbs, and cannot seem to make himself move.

Mr. Kelly is a middle school teacher, neither a very great one, nor a terrible one—by the estimation of most of his students. Mara is an exception. She had classes with him for three years. She took it personally when he never seemed to praise her work, no matter how hard she worked on it. When he gave her no points for good work because she wrote 'Mara' on her assignments instead of her given name. When she overheard him saying that he worried about her as though there was something _wrong_ with her anger, when she needed that anger to survive.

Mara's heart is bitter, and some of that bitterness is reserved for Mr. Kelly.

Mr. Kelly gasps and shakes in his bed in a panic attack worse than he's had in years, twisted shapes dancing around him in the shadows, and the sound of high-pitched laughter in his ears that he tries so hard to convince himself is not real.

It begins like this:

The twins James and Bill Smith sneak out past their curfew to go smoke on the elementary school swings. They've done it a thousand times, but somehow this time seems different. They have chills down their spines; every shadow looking like a strange disjointed man lurking, every sound out in the dark echoing back like laughter.

They make the excuse of autumn chill to go home immediately, too unsettled to finish their blunts, and too embarrassed to admit their fear even to each other.

Jimmy King only came back to town to take care of an elderly relative. He didn't expect to reconnect with a school friend, nor for their old friendship to blossom so quickly into something far more intimate. Sneaking out to see Duke after his aunti goes to bed for the night has become his favorite part of any day he can get away with it.

The route, down the block and through the alley, is familiar. Jimmy knows it like the back of his hand, but it suddenly seems strange to him. The shadows of the houses grow longer and longer, and the moonlit branches of the trees seem to curve like claws. Jimmy rushes, stumbling over uneven bits of sidewalk that seem to be reaching up for his feet. He's in a cold sweat by the time Duke opens the back door to let him in.

He forgets all about it, though, when his big softie of a boyfriend kisses him.

Young love is a powerful analgesic.

Little Tim White's night light burns out, and he pees the bed, too frightened to get out of it to go to the bathroom.

"The laughing shadow-man was trying to get me!" he tells his exhausted and exasperated mother. She sends him to school with sharp words, and goes to work at anything but her best.

Later, she will regret that.

Clio Robinson wakes up to discover that the dryer she'd started at bedtime hasn't dried her clothes at all, and has nothing clean to wear.

Mr. Anderson could have sworn he closed the garage door when he got home. But when he gets up in the morning, it's to find the door wide open, and that what he can only imagine was wild animals have gotten into the trash and spread it all over his car and his yard. He gets to work late, and in a foul temper.

Only later will he find the deep scratches around the broken lock to the garage, and wonder.

Ms. Lee finds her motorcycle's tank completely drained. The gas cap she finds crumpled, twisted and melted beneath the machine, and curses whoever vandalized her bike. She hates having to bum a ride to work.

But most truly, it begins like this:

When Mr. Kelly finally makes himself get up in the dark to take a xanax so he can sleep, he trips over his slippers and falls down hard, all his weight coming down on one knee and the corner of a book with a sickening _crunch_ as the delicate joint breaks. There is no one home to hear him scream in pain, the sound all swallowed up in the dancing shadows.

He has to crawl across the room to his phone, injured leg dragging painfully, to call the ambulance.

When the sun rises and Jenny Turner climbs out of bed, the first thing she does is go check on the fledgling doves in the nest outside her window to cheer herself up. But what she finds are two x's scratched in the glass of her window, placed so they line up with her eyes when she looks out and sees two delicate bird skeletons in the nest, charred black.

Lonely old Mrs. Harrison's dog, her beloved little companion, barks and barks and barks and does not stop until his heart bursts and he drops dead in the yard.

All this, and it is only the beginning of the month.

This is only the beginning.


	3. building, building

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> misfortunes small, and large

The little misfortunes continue into the second week of October, and the town is on edge.

Every mishap and hurt that makes the gossip mill, that drifts past the ears of the summoners, fills them with joy, with cruel pride. Their eyes meet in the hallways, as they go to and from their classes, and they smile. They glory in what they have done without any way for it to be traced back to them. They plot, quietly, what they will have their demon do next.

Hayseed has done more than they realize. No one is at their best running on broken sleep. Every little snap of annoyance, every impatient cruelty, feeds on another. Every mean act the humans subject each other to increases the general misery. Tensions are wound as tight as piano wire, primed to snap with enough force to slice a throat out.

People, stressed, become erratic— _chaotic_. Every bit of it pure fuel to a chaos demon.

The summoners sneak away into the copse of weedy trees together, in the darkness. They summon Hayseed to them. They have thought of many mean pranks and little cruelties they do not dare commit themselves.

The light is dim, just coals upon which they are burning a new offering—a bit of steak Belial took from his family's fridge. Hayseed hunkers over the little coal grill, foul burning-meat smoke swirling around him. The summoners are too eager with their instructions to pay his appearance much mind, beyond noticing that he has replaced his missing right arm with a stolen cane, and that there are mushrooms growing on his right leg.

The straw that makes up his body is still smoldering, the ruddy light and the smoke obscuring the veins that grow through it, spreading out from the scorched rabbit heart. It beats hummingbird-fast, pumping blood and ash and pure chaos magic. Hidden. Hidden away and secret.

The summoners do not think to look, and do not see. They have many instructions, and Hayseed giggles, and digs around in the coals with his glove hand as they talk. He does not say no, to any of it. Not even Leonard the Clever pauses to consider if that means 'yes'.

Belial the Wicked is skilled enough at keeping his only two companions at his side to avoid speaking his deepest and cruelest desires. He goes to the edge, but does not let Leonard or Mara become disgusted or overly uncomfortable. He comforts himself that there will be time.

The air is cold, and the smoke is unpleasant. The summoners do not dare stay out too long, for fear of being caught. Leonard suggests parting ways, and Belial agrees. They leave, one after the other, leaving Mara to linger briefly behind. Mara the Bitter stands tall, chin squared, red-clawed hands clenched to fists in the pocket of her oversized hoodie.

She looks down at the ungainly figure of Hayseed, and spits out a single name. Nothing else. Unsaid is 'I killed to bring you into the world' and 'I gave you your name' and ' _you owe me this one thing_ '.

The goggled eyes set in the rough burlap mask both fix on her, a leap of fire burning within them that is not in any way a reflection of the little coal grill. The mask ripples, moves almost but not quite like human skin into a wide smile, with burning coals glowing in the gaps of the rough stitches of his mouth.

Taking this as agreement, Mara leaves with the almost imperceptible scent of gunpowder and gasoline lingering in her long hair.

Hayseed stands, a gawking lopsided figure in the dark. He limps away, right leg dragging. All about him the shadows twist to dance and cavort, laughing.

  
  


In the elementary school, the children are all talking about the Laughing Shadow Man. The older children make a point of scaring the younger, pretending not to be scared themselves. The younger are blatantly terrified. Many of them claim to have seen him in their yards, in their houses, in their bedrooms.

The teachers are confused about where this sudden meme has come from, but chalk it up as a result of the approaching holiday. At first they pay it no more mind than Bloody Mary or the like, save to chastise the older children if they scare the younger  _too_ much.

Several parents call the school, angry that their children are coming home traumatized and scared of the dark. The meme has become disruptive to learning. The teachers make a rule against speaking about the Shadow Man.

In the elementary school, the children huddle in little groups to whisper warnings to each other about the Laughing Shadow Man. The world is big and scary, and he is the scariest part of it.

  
  


The local hospital has very few beds. In such a sleepy little community, they have never had a need for more. They notice, though, that the few beds they have are being used much more often. There is a rash of clumsiness, this month, that they do not know what to attribute to.

  
  


Millie Bouchard, up in the middle of the night to make a snack, opens the microwave to have the contents explode in her face.

Must we entail the supposed crime of young Millie? No. Suffice it to say that the mere act of living has been enough, in the hearts of the three summoners, to count as fault.

Millie goes to the hospital with burns. Near-delirious, she tells the EMT's in the ambulance that there was a face in the reflection of the microwave—a burlap mask, with a burning mouth. Ms. Lee makes the appropriate comforting noises, and gives her something for the pain.

Ms. Lee wonders if Millie was playing with fire, when she got burned. There's a smell about her, like gasoline.

  
  


Coming home late from work, Mr. Davis notices the porch lightbulb flickering. He pauses to poke at it, to screw it in more securely. It bursts at the first touch, slicing his fingertips open deep enough to need stitches.

He curses himself twelve times a fool. He tells no one that he thought he saw an inhumanly proportioned figure in the shadows, laughing at him. But he does not forget, and he flinches at any moving shadow.

  
  


A whole group of teens goes out late, hoping to get an early start on Halloween pranking. They bring toilet paper, eggs, and alcohol.

They don't make it far. Their muffled laughter seems to echo strangely. The air chills them. The shadows seem darker. But, filled with bravado and cheap beer, they urge each other on. They smash a few pumpkins, left on doorsteps for decoration. The guts spill out, strangely red in the one flashlight the group brought.

Disturbed and unwilling to admit it, they move on. They make to cut through the woods, with an idea to trash a teacher's house.

The flashlight flickers once, twice, and goes out.

Later, the EMT's get only a garbled account. There was a stranger in the woods, they figure, a hobo or someone playing a prank. There was screaming, teens scattering and attacking when they ran into each other. All told, there were multiple turned ankles, many scrapes and bruises, a cracked wrist, and a broken arm.

"It wasn't a person," James Smith tells Ms. Lee, voice shaking. "It wasn't anything human. Or animal. It was something worse."

He has nothing more to tell her after that, and when she looks to the twin brother who hasn't let go of him the whole time she's been stabilizing James' broken arm, Bill neither agrees nor disagrees. He makes no sound, face dead-pale and eyes shock wide, staring into space as though he doesn't even notice the deep scratches bleeding down his arms and neck.

The smell of gunpowder confuses her. There hadn't been any fireworks involved in the prank run, and none of the teens reported gunfire. Ms. Lee knows most of them, or their families, and doesn't think they're the kind of kids to be off playing with guns at night.

  
  


Little Tim White crashes his bike, simultaneously taking down a section of picket fence, two prize-winning roses, and his best friend Rita. He knocks a loose tooth out, skins his arm, and gives Rita (who was not wearing a helmet) a concussion.

He claims the shadow man came after him, and that his bike's brakes failed. But the brakes work just fine, when they're tested, and he gets in twice as much trouble for lying and making up stories.

Rita's mother, formerly great friends with Tim's, gives her the cold shoulder and refuses to let her daughter play with him any more.

  
  


All these, and many more. Stove oil flare ups, electronic failures, startlement at just the wrong moment leading to injuries with dangerous tools.

  
  


Ms. Lee, exhausted and riding her motorcycle home from the hospital after another long shift with no down time, thinks she sees a tall hunched figure keeping pace with her in a lopsided run out in the shadows along the road. She laughs, shaking her head at herself, and opens the throttle wide open to leave the illusion behind.

She never thought herself the superstitious type, weird as the rash of bad luck in town is.

  
  


The most troublesome teens don't dare go out pranking people, but things keep happening that would normally be ascribed to them.

Cars keyed, but in strange lines like claw marks, the edges of the paint bubbled and charred. Tires slashed. Trash cans upended over porches. Garages and sheds broken into and ransacked.

The local law enforcement is out, night after night. They find no sign of vagrants in the woods where the teens had frightened themselves, they find no sign of who is dancing around them to steal and vandalize.

The thirteenth of October lands on a Friday, this year. There are more emergency calls than the local emergency services can field. Vandalism, again, and so many injuries, and above that _housebreakers_. People keep calling the police in panic, saying that there was a pale man in a burlap mask in their house. That they'd seen him, lurching toward them.

But there is no sign of entry, when the police arrive. No sign that anyone who wasn't supposed to be there had ever been in the house.

Sheriff Brown is both exhausted and thoroughly pissed off by the time he gets home—near midnight, having left the mess to his deputies. He comforts himself with the thought of the legal trouble all the prank callers are going to get in, as he kicks off his uniform boots and shoves his feet into his house slippers.

Within, his foot comes in contact with a small snake. It responds by striking to inject every bit of venom it has directly into his foot. When Sheriff Brown stumbles away, shouting, he sees a small grey-brown body squirm away under the couch. He empties his service revolver into the couch, swearing, and then calls in his own emergency to the overwhelmed dispatch.

By the time he gets to the hospital, his leg has already turned bruise-purple and swollen in hemorrhage. They dose him with antivenin—but antivenin is tricky stuff. It must be for the exact type of snake it's counteracting, or it does no good. The local hospital carries the antivenom for the local pit viper—the only type of snake bite they see.

It doesn't work.

Even medicated, a snake bite is a horribly painful thing to try to survive—and Sheriff Brown's is a very very bad one. His life hangs in the balance for days, no way to tell if he will recover, and he is in agony the entire time.

As for the crimes of Sheriff Brown we will say only this:

On Sunday, when Pastor Robinson from the local church tells the congregation to pray for him, three young women and girls bite their tongues as they bow their heads, or cross their fingers discreetly beneath the cover of their skirts, or refuse to speak the 'amen' to add their support to the prayer.

And Mara goes to school on Monday with her head high, pride like a mantle around her shoulders.

  
  


But do not forget, this story ends in blood and fire.

All this is but the gentle prelude.


	4. gruesome artistry

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> there will be no salvation

The third week of October. The trees grow more and more bare, bright colored leaves falling and fading to brown, and the small town is reeling.

Something is wrong, and only the most obtuse and obstinate refuse to admit it. There is a class of people, mostly men, who take it as a point of pride to refuse to back down in their assertions that nothing is happening. Who decry the worried as weak-willed and hysterical.

There is evil in the chilly fall air, as present as the smell of smoke that does not disperse. Not even when there are no leaf piles being burnt, no barbecues running.

Hayseed is strong, after the chaos of the thirteenth. He is seen, more and more. Everyone spots a raggedy pale man in the shadows, a grinning burlap mask in the dark, or a long-limbed lurching figure in the corner of the eye. The more frightened they are, the more they see him.

The summoners congregate in secret again. It is Leonard who brings it up first:

"The demon was supposed to be weak," Leonard says. He sits hunched up, with his books of demonology and magic and the coded notebook where he meticulously drafted the plan to bring Hayseed into the world hugged to his chest. "He shouldn't be able to do all this! We need to send him back, before he hurts anyone else. I mean... you heard what happened to the Sheriff..."

While Belial thinks fast, searching for the words that will bring Leonard back in line, Mara scoffs openly.

"You _would_ side with that asshole," she sneers. In the bitter chambers of her heart it is tallied as a burning-hot betrayal.

Leonard bites his lip and hunches down further, cowed. Belial has come up with his line of attack, then, and he brings them together with soft poison words. "When did any of them ever protect _us_?" he asks, and "This is just karma coming back to get them." and "Of course the demon's strong, we're so good and so strong together."

They leave, unanimous in their decision to leave the chaos-demon Hayseed to his own devices. Though he was the first to say it, Leonard does not again speak the desire to do away with Hayseed. Leonard the Coward is always too easily swayed.

  
  


After Mrs. Harrison's little barky dog, the first pets to disappear are outdoor cats.

Few think anything of it, at first. It is a dangerous life for a cat, outdoors. Between cars, hawks, dogs, and so many other dangers, a cat disappearing is not a remarkable event.

Backyard chickens, likewise, are prey to many things. When they vanish, leaving behind blood and feathers, it is easy to ascribe the death to cats or foxes or any number of mundane dangers.

When the skulls and skeletons of both appear, burnt-clean and arranged into artful sculptures, _that_ causes comment. Satanists, the whispers abound, hiding in the woods where the teens were frightened? Nevermind that the police can't find any sign of them. Or the teens themselves? Nevermind that they are for the most part as terrified as everyone else, and avoiding going out at night.

Those who are able to avoid letting their pets out at night do so. Still, cats can be sneaky and dart past people's ankles in a bid for freedom. Dogs, kept indoors, will relieve themselves on the floor if given no other option.

Mr. Anderson's old yellow lab, Daisy, dances in place and cries at the back door until he finally gives in and lets her out. Just into the fenced back yard, with the porch light on, and watching her. Until the porch light bursts with a pop and a sizzle, plunging the yard into darkness.

Daisy barks, three sharp panicky barks followed by _silence_ , unbroken and all-encompassing. Mr. Anderson curses as he scrambles, searching for a light. It feels like ages, but really only a minute, before he rushes out with his cellphone shining.

The beam of light it sheds is narrow, and does not reach far. Mr. Anderson calls Daisy as he stumbles through the yard, searching along the ground. He's almost at the corner of the yard when he notices something at head height, far too high up to be the dog.

But the dog it is—or what's left of her. Her head, atop a delicate assemblage of her bones—charred black, twisted and rearranged into a configuration that almost looks human, guts hanging from it like garland.

It says something about the state of the town that the neighbors who hear him screaming and crying in the night do not go outside to check on him. They close their ears and hunker down, caring only about their own safety.

There is no safety to be had.

 _Animals_ might be the ones dying, but the people are not safe, either. There is sabotage everywhere.

A ragged figure glimpsed lurching toward a window, a gloved hand smacking into the glass, and the window bursts inward—lacerating the person unlucky enough to be in front of it. An oven at the local cafe, turned on to preheat, explodes. A water heater's fail-safes all fail, and it blows through two stories and out the roof of a building. A car parked in a garage quietly turns on in the middle of the night, and poisons an entire family near to death with carbon monoxide.

  
  


Jimmy King's auntie falls and hits her head on the edge of the kitchen counter. Her fragile skin splits, and there's blood everywhere from the little wound. Jimmy cleans it up and applies pressure to the wound as they wait for the ambulance. Sitting on the kitchen floor amidst a spatter of blood, long skinny limbs wrapped around his auntie and a kitchen towel pressed to her head to staunch the bleeding, he begs her to tell him what it was she was trying to get in the kitchen, and why she didn't just call for him.

She swears up and down that she did, and that _his voice_ told her to get the tea herself. He hadn't heard a thing, and he certainly hadn't refused to help her. It's a long wait to get the ambulance, and a longer one at the hospital. Jimmy is exhausted when he finally tucks his auntie safe into her bed at home, but not so tired that he doesn't dare the terrors of the night to run over to Duke's to see his boyfriend.

It's worth it just to be held—up until the smell of smoke on Jimmy's clothes triggers Duke's asthma into an attack worse than he's had in years. His inhaler, when their desperate search finally locates it, is unexpectedly empty.

His lips are blue from lack of oxygen by the time the ambulance arrives.

  
  


The little hospital is overloaded. The EMT's who work the ambulance are run ragged. Strange happenings in homes add to the rash of minor driving accidents. The stories are all remarkably similar. A pale man standing in the road, burning cinders in his chest, burlap mask.

"Mass Hysteria" the whisper goes, among the medical professionals who deal with the injured bodies. On the other end of things, the gossip among the mechanics is "Sabotage". They've noticed that the wrecked vehicles coming in have odd parts missing. The two group's social spheres remain separate enough that they do not hear each other's theories.

Ms. Lee, running from emergency to emergency in the ambulance, carries a scent of gunpowder on her clothes that cannot be washed out.

  
  


Mara the Bitter climbs out her bedroom window to sit on the roof at night, stolen cigarette between her red-clawed fingers. She breathes out an artistically slow plume of smoke as she feels the energies of the town. She has always been sensitive, but she has never felt anything the bubbling and boiling of the growing power. There is an edge like a knife blade to the air, and she glories in what she has caused.

Belial the Wicked leans out his window, breathing the cold smoke-tinged air, and smiles only when he hears cackling laughter and distant screams.

And Clever Leonard locks his door and window, closes the curtains tight against the darkness, and pours over his hoarded books of demonology—trying to understand what he and the only people he claims as friends have done.

  
  


Clio Robinson is setting the table for supper on Thursday, when she hears that creepy laughter like everyone had been whispering about at school. The silverware on the table begins to slowly float upward before her eyes. She watches in stunned silence, until every last piece of it rotates to point toward her at once.

Her scream brings her father running. He finds his only child huddled on the floor with a steak knife and two forks embedded in the arms she threw up to protect her face. Another knife has gone through the side of her shirt, slicing her side open and pinning a piece of fabric to the wall. The rest of the cutlery is buried deep in the drywall around where she'd been standing.

Pastor Robinson cradles Clio close, trying to staunch the bleeding as they wait for the overworked ambulance to come for her. From the beginning of the month he has been fielding increasingly frightened inquiries, soothing his flock as their misfortunes multiply. His daughter shakes and cries in his arms, and he can no longer deny a realization that has been growing in the back of his mind.

"There is an evil at work in this town," he says, fire and brimstone igniting in his chest. He is filled with a purpose he has not felt since he was a young man, first joining the priesthood. "We must drive it out with prayer."

He tells the EMT's, when they come. He tells the hospital staff. He tells the frightened folk who call for his council. The whisper grows all through Friday and Saturday from 'prayer meeting on Sunday' to 'prayer meeting all day on Sunday' to 'a great revival, prayer and testimony to save the town'.

In two days, the faith and hopes of the entire town center on Pastor Robinson's humble little church. People who haven't been seen at church in decades brush off their Sunday best and plan to be there bright and early.

"Prayer. Prayer to save us. Safety in the Church." These are the watchwords. This is the hope, and dies just after dawn when the first of the early-comers see the front of the building.

Within the church gates, on the holy ground itself, is a bone sculpture twice the height of a man. Deer skulls and charred antlers crown the towering assemblage that stands like a middle finger extended toward any God. And behind it, vivid on the white clapboard siding of the church, gouts of blood dripping slowly down from two X's, and beneath a swooped line, like a lopsided smile directly across the doors.

Half the town sees it. The rest hear of it soon enough.

  
  


There will be no salvation through prayer.

It is far too late for that.


	5. terrorists in terror

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> the ending begins

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> the fic is now fully written, and I'll be posting a chapter a day until the end of the month.

In the final week of October, the fear is thick enough in the air to taste.

The community is splintering apart, in the wake of the failed prayer meeting. There is no trust left between people. Even Pastor Robinson is given the side-eye, after the defilement of his church grounds. Those who still support him shun (and are shunned by) those who who suspect him.

Everyone's door is locked at night, and no one dares hold out the hand of support of anyone else. Those who have suffered the worst misfortunes are treated as pariahs, as though it might be catching. Those who have not, not yet, are viewed with suspicion. Everyone suspects their neighbors of being a part of the plot that damages them all. They have turned in on themselves, insular and vicious.

They are cut off, isolated, and perfect prey for a being of chaos.

Half a dozen of the men who were the loudest in refusing to admit there was anything wrong come home after work on Monday to empty homes. Their spouses and children packed up and left town without them. They are beyond furious, but there is nothing they can do.

The bars where they drink at night are filled with frightened energy poorly hidden beneath bravado, and the kind of men who truly believe that violence is the only acceptable outlet for any emotion. Blended with alcohol, it is a volatile mix. When the inevitable bar fights break out, the overworked dispatch is slow to send anyone to break it up. The overwhelmed ambulance is even slower to pick up the injured and haul them to the little local hospital that does not have beds for them.

There is a class of people, mostly those same men, who have always imagined that they would be the hero of an action movie if only they were given the opportunity. They have dreamed of violence, of the license to maim and kill and not only escape repercussions, but be _lauded_ for it.

It is coincidence that so many of them decide, separately and all together, that _this is the time_. They imagine themselves the brave vigilantes, the saviors of their community.

Night falls again, and they arm themselves with knives, with bats, and more than one reproduction katana made of metal too soft and dull to actually cut. They dress themselves in faux-military clothes and creep out in what they imagine is astonishing stealth, and through it all they tell themselves that the faint excited giggling they hear in the back of their minds is the brave pounding of their hearts.

Really, there are no coincidences in this chaos.

Shall we list the results?

Three is the number of men who spend the night lost in a little patch of scrubby woods gone strange and unfamiliar around them. Eerie shapes and sounds dance around them in the dark as they stumble on in circles, searching for a way out. The air reeks of gasoline and gunpowder. Branches grab and scratch at them like hands, tearing their skin and their clothes. Stones and tree roots leap up in their paths to send them tripping and stumbling.

They give up all hope well before morning. Their put-on bravery abandons them, and they spend the night crying and sobbing—the very way their have reprimanded their baby sons for crying. When the sun rises and they can see where they are, they stagger home battered and traumatized.

Four are the men who come across another vigilante in the dark. Two pairs of them fight, viciously, with fists and with knives, until—bleeding and battered—one breaks and runs. They are all absolutely certain they have taken out the enemy, until they meet again in the hospital waiting room and are forced to stare their own stupidity in the face.

Five are their victims.

Five normal people out in the dark for their own reasons. Jimmy King caught running home from another late-night visit with Duke, a woman who hasn't kicked her nicotine habit quite as much as she wants her family to believe and is out for a secret smoke, a man out walking his young puppy for one last time before bed, and two people just coming home from a late shift at work.

The two women who are targeted do the most damage—striking their attackers across the face with a fistful of keys and the spike of a high-heel—but no one gets off unscathed. Five people are beaten to a pulp and left in the dark.

Five people who scream for help, and find their neighbors ears shut.

It is all more pain, more chaos, more _power_.

It is hard to say, afterward, who the first person to die is.

Was it little Tim White, out riding his bike again for the first time since he got grounded? He rides downhill to feel the rush of freedom in the cool fall air, only to discover that his brakes have failed yet again and he can't stop. His bike zooms out into the intersection, in front of a heavy old car whose driver doesn't have the reflexes anymore to stop in time.

Is it Tim, crumpled little body a bloody heap on the curb? Or is it Old Mrs. Harrison, who has a massive heart attack and falls dead in the street when she steps out of her car and sees what she's done?

Was it Sheriff Brown, lying in the hospital bed he would not vacate for others who might need it more? A harried nurse gives him his next dose of morphine and fails to note it on his chart. The next nurse who comes by, seeing him asleep but due, gives him a dose as well. This second nurse has been cautiously but consistently over-dosing the Sheriff. This time is no different.

Sheriff Brown does not have a heart monitor attached to him anymore to warn that his heart is slowing to dangerous levels. It was needed more by worse-injured patients. Morphine is a quiet death—he slips away in silence, and nothing brings the exhausted nurses' attention to his corpse for quite some time.

Or maybe it was Ms. Lee, fresh off yet another eighteen-hour shift, flying out of town like a bat out of hell. She isn't superstitious, but even she has a breaking point. The skin-crawling wrongness that has pervade the town along with the rash of injuries is finally too much. She told no one, just grabbed her wallet and a change of clothes and ran.

Ms. Lee's motorcycle, hitting its top speed as she reaches the city limits, skids out. Her bike and her body both wrap around the base of the cheerful welcome sign. The gas in the busted tank sparks, ignites, and turns bike, body, and sign into a flaming pyre belching out a thick column of greasy black smoke over the town.

It burns, and burns, and will not go out.

So, in blood and in fire, the ending begins.


	6. a Deal's a Deal

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Leonard was the first of the summoners to realize that they had done something wrong. It is Mara who brings it up next, when the summoners meet.

The main road in and out of the town is barricaded.

The welcome sign is burning. It cannot be extinguished, and the harried emergency response team places concrete barriers and sand-barrels across the road to keep people away from the fire as they wait for it to burn itself out. But it burns, and burns, and never runs out of fuel.

Why this barricade? Why this final cutting-off of the town from the outside world? To every worker, and to the people making the call, it seemed the easiest and most sensible way to deal with the danger. And they do not question _why_ trapping the curséd town in a bubble was their first thought. They are too worn out to question the wicked cackling that seems to echo into their ears.

A thick pall of smoke blankets the town. Ms. Lee's failed escape attempt is the final one, before the end.

Everyone else is trapped.

Leonard was the first of the summoners to realize that they had done something wrong. Having been chastised for it, he dares not speak up again. It is Mara who brings it up next, when the summoners meet.

Cold and Bitter it may be, but Mara still has a heart. It is certainly not the death of the one person she desperately wanted to kill that swayed her. Neither is it the deaths of the Child and the Old Woman, neither of which she was capable of seeing as valuable people. It is the death of Ms. Lee, with her motorcycle and her buzzcut and the full sleeve of tattoos that she kept covered at work, that is too much for Mara. She looked up to Ms. Lee as an example of non-normative womanhood, as proof that there was more than one way to be a successful adult.

Whatever small slight she harbored, by being unable to get close to an adult who had no desire to have anything but a distant professional relationship with a child, Mara did not want Ms. Lee to die. But Ms. Lee _is_ dead, her blackened skeleton bathed in flames and wrapped around the sign burning at the edge of town. It is a hollow-eyed Mara who speaks the words: "Hayseed's gone too far. We need to stop this."

Leonard breathes out a desperate sigh of relief. "It wasn't supposed to be like this," he says, quick and eager. "It was supposed to be nuisance, not... not." He can't make himself say 'murder'. The word, unspoken, echoes between them as he hopefully holds up a notebook. "I think, with all three of us, we should be able to undo the summoning and—"

"No," speaks Belial the Wicked, eyes alight. "No, this is _exactly_ how it was supposed to happen." His voice is still soft, but for the first time his companions can hear the poison in his mouth. He sees that his allies have broken with him, that they can stand with him no longer, and he no longer cares to cultivate them. Not with burning-flesh smoke in the air, and blood on the ground. Not when he is so hungry for more suffering. "This is destiny," he says. "The demon was supposed to be weak, but he's not. Isn't this what we wanted? What we _deserve_? Let them all burn!"

Mara's rage is hot and fast, and she turns it on Belial without an instant's hesitation. Leonard clutches his notebook, cowering and flinching at every harsh word, as Mara unloads on Belial. She calls him a freak and an asshole, and informs him in no uncertain terms that they are absolutely going to undo the summoning together. And when he refuses, she threatens to tell Everyone that the demon was _his_ fault and _his_ idea.

Belial laughs in her face. "I'll say it was you. Who are they going to believe?" He asks, poison-honey sweet. "The quiet boy, or the Goth Witch?" He has cultivated his image carefully. He can cry on command, and most authority figures in their lives see him as good and responsible. Mara has been too angry, too different, and worn her interest in the occult too obviously.

Mara hates it, but she does know when she's beaten. She knows when the cost of meeting a fight head-on is more than even she is willing to endure for the satisfaction of fighting it. Leonard wilts visibly as she makes the sounds to get rid of Belial with him believing she's cowed.

They do not call Hayseed to themselves to give more instruction, she will not agree to that, but neither do they try to undo the summoning to send the demon away. The three summoners part ways with bad blood between them, each toward their own home.

Mara walks with her head high, shoulders square, tread measured—she walks the way she does through the hallways of school, proud and unyielding in the face of all those who would revile her. She does not falter until she turns the corner and is out of sight of Belial. Then she breaks into a dead sprint, taking a shortcut between houses and over picket fences to circle around and grab Leonard before he reaches his house. She drags him into the dark, and his frightened shriek before he recognizes her goes unnoticed in the general terror of the town.

Mara's lungs burn from the unusual exercise, compounded by the heavy smoke in the air. She coughs, gasping for air, but she makes her meaning known. "We need to end this."

"I don't know," Leonard wavers, uncertain. "Without all three of us in agreement—"

"Two of three, that's more than half," Mara argues. "I killed the rabbit and gave Hayseed his name, you gave the offering, that has to count for something. We _have_ to try. C'mon egghead, I'm sure you can come up with _something_."

"Maybe.... We can't get rid of him, but maybe we can rein Hayseed in?" Leonard says. "Just for these last few days of the month?" Together they creep to the weedy copse of woods where they first summoned the chaos demon, doing what they can to keep out of sight. They dare not let Belial know that they have turned against him. They have seen how he treats his enemies, and do not wish to be in that category themselves.

Mara has a lighter in her pocket. Leonard carries kindling and charcoal. They make their fire, but it was Belial who had the offering of flesh. When they call for Hayseed, he does not come.

"Fuck this," Mara snarls, and pulls the pocket knife out of her pocket. She keeps it sharp, and the blade cuts into the ball of her thumb like butter. She holds her hand over the smoldering grill, and bleeds. Blood and fire and foul words; Hayseed lurches out of the dark to meet them.

The tall lopsided figure of Hayseed lurks on the edge of the ruddy firelight, pulsing glows of burning coal flickering in his chest. He is indistinct to the summoner's eyes, shifting and fidgeting where he's crouched. His goggled eyes burn like flames.

"You've gone too far, demon," Mara says, as she pinches her thumb to staunch the bleeding. "This needs to stop. Leonard, what are the words that will bind him?"

Oh, Leonard, Leonard, he tries. He licks his lips and consults his notebook, and reads out in a shaking voice: "Child of chaos, by the binding of the sacrifice and the name we have given you, we bid you cease your torment of—"

Hayseed laughs, high and cackling. "No."

The demon has never disagreed with the summoners before. Mara and Leonard experience a shared shock of fear.

Mara takes the attack while Leonard reels. "We made you. You _have_ to obey us," she snarls.

"Made a deal with me." Hayseed bounces in place, flames leaping in his wheeling goggled eyes. Burning coals glow in his rough-sewn burlap mouth. "Obeying wasn't part of the deal."

"Then... then we cancel the deal," Leonard tries. "The deal is done, and you need to go."

"Not done yet!" Hayseed sing-songs. "The body and the name of Hayseed for _one month_ in exchange for revenge. It's not over."

"There's been enough revenge," Mara says, and even as she says it she boggles at the words and the truth of them. She never thought she would be sated on it, but she is not as hard and cold as she thought herself before death became real. She has no stomach for more. "Stick to inconvenience, not murder."

Hayseed cackles. "That's not the deal! You never said you got to choose the type of revenge."

"We want to renegotiate," Leonard says, desperately. "You have to let us renegotiate."

"No," Hayseed repeats. His twisted smile widens, burlap mask contorted. He stands, toweringly tall, and the charcoal in the little grill flares up at the same time to cast him in brighter light.

He isn't made of burnt straw and ragged clothes and swirling smoke anymore. The scorched rabbit's heart has grown, glutted on chaos and pain. Veins pumping ash-corrupted blood, muscles, bones, and skin. His body is dead-corpse pale, filthy with smears of smoke and ash, and skeletal-thin in a way that speaks of unbearable hunger. He breathes, and flickers of fire show through patches of skin gone transparent. The fingers of the scarecrow's glove have burned away from a real hand with twisted blackened nails, and his missing arm is no longer replaced with a the hook of a cane but a blackened mechanical hand that moves like it's alive. Hayseed's left leg ends in a horrifyingly human foot, while the right leg that drags behind is still moldering hay and a ragged boot.

"This body and the name of Hayseed for one month, in exchange for revenge!" Hayseed shouts. "The deal will not be changed!"

Leonard still has not the lion's heart of his name. He screams, and runs. Mara may not be brave, but pure viciousness can be made to serve the same purpose. She lunges forward to spit into Hayseed's face, and flips him the bird with both bloodied hands before she turns to follow Leonard.

He is waiting for her under the light of the first street lamp, wide-eyed and shaking.

Mara marches up to him, hands clenched into fists. "What have you _done_ ," she snarls.

"I done? Me?" Leonard reels back, stung.

"You!" Mara looms over him, and Leonard flinches away. "You're the one who made a spell without any way to stop it!"

"It was supposed to be a test!" Leonard protests. "It was just a test, with a weak demon. I don't understand why—" But he sees the promise of violence in Mara's expression, something he'd appreciated when it was aimed at people who bullied him, and doesn't like at all anymore. "I'll figure it out," he says. "I'll find a way to stop Hayseed."

"You'd better," Mara says, and walks away.

They go to their homes alone, all three summoners. All three hurt and betrayed. Wild laughter echoes through the doomed town, and in it Mara and Leonard both hear the repeated words: "One month, one month! Revenge!"

There are three nights remaining to the month of October.


	7. Critical Mass

October draws to its bloody close; red leaves falling to blacken on the ground, and frost in the smoky air.

Blood, fire, and fear—Hayseed is brimming full of it. Everyone has seen a glimpse of a gangly limping figure in a burlap mask. _Everyone_ carries that image in their mind, a chink in the wall to let the demon in. The power of the occult is reaching its peak as Hallowe'en approaches, and Hayseed has had an entire month to spread chaos and gather strength.

At first, all Hayseed could do was make small tweaks to people's reactions, encourage them in things they'd normally do—fear in the fearful, impatience in the impatient—but every successful manipulation weakens the target's resistance to greater manipulation.

He has been patient, so patient, as he built his power from the pitifully weak offering of a rabbit's heart to something a little more appropriate to a true Lord of Chaos. Few of his rank would bother attending for such a meager first bite, but the being who is currently wearing the name of Hayseed is a scrapper at his core. He was not born to his rank and power, no. He was born a starveling thing among the children of chaos in their infinitudes. They are like maggots, feeding upon each other in an endless cycle of entropy and pain. There isn't a millionth of a chance for one to survive, much less to thrive, to crawl forth from the rotting pits in search of _more_.

What power Hayseed has now he made himself, clawed it out of a reluctant world and held on to it with all the violence he can muster. No one is his equal in cobbling together a catastrophe from garbage, scraps, the discard that no one else wants. Hayseed's whole being burns for destruction, to send it all up in flames, but he has taken great care in setting his scene. There is artistry in how he has turned the town into a bomb, cut off and under pressure, and he glories in the edge of terrible possibility.

Nothing else compares to that exhilarating moment between lighting the fuse and the dynamite blow.

Hayseed weaves through the town, his carefully prepared killing ground, in a shambling, loping run. The street lights sputter and spark when he comes near, strobing and bursting. On the second-to-last night of October, it is time to accelerate, put a brick on the gas pedal and _burn_.

Here, Tim White's bereaved mother crying in her kitchen. The sharp cruelty of her impatience with him as his fear grew through the month, and her failure to believe that his bike's brakes really had failed him, come back to her a thousand times sharper. Her defenses are down. How easy to turn 'why not me instead of him' to 'me along with him'. She turns all the burners of the gas stove and oven on, without lighting it, and lights a candle across the room.

She turns her home into a beautiful time bomb that will take out everyone in the household, and several people in the neighboring houses, with them in the blast and the fire that follows. She lays herself down on the floor to suffocate in the gas fumes, the high cackle of Hayseed's laughter lost in her hoarse sobs.

Before he moves on, Hayseed scratches an x-eyed smiley face in the paint of her front door with one blackened fingernail, and the paint burns and bubbles away from the deep gouged lines.

Death, death, the word whispered in the ears of the angry. Those men who've already listened to the siren song of violence are so easy to influence. The suggestion that they _did_ have the right target, that the man they saw in the hospital is the true culprit, is an easy one to swallow. Two men, injured but strong, kick down the door of two men more badly injured to finish the job. One man succeeds, and one man dies to his intended victim. Red blood stains carpets, and fire seems to be the way to hide the evidence.

One man, in his haste, fails to leave himself an exit from the gasoline-soaked room he sets ablaze. He burns alive, an excruciating death whose only mercy is its swiftness. One man leaves himself an escape, and starts his car with the intent to flee the town, only to have the engine explode when the ignition sparks.

Hayseed has been busy. Toolsheds, garages, and broken vehicles have been raided all month, and chaos magic adds destructive power to even the smallest improvised explosive devices.

Where shall the firefighters concentrate their efforts, with so many fires raging? Who shall the ambulance rush to help? It makes little difference which emergency the ambulance rushes to—there are no EMTs in it. There are half-trained sheriff's deputies, a nurse, and a few volunteers with cpr training. With Ms. Lee's death, the remaining EMT collapsed from overwork and cannot help anyone anymore.

Three men who were lost in the woods find the whispering horror chasing them even in their homes, and rush forth from them screaming and half-naked. One climbs up high, running from his fear, and falls, skull smashed open on the rocks. One stumbles onto the property of a terrified person determined to protect their turf at all costs, and takes a shotgun blast to the chest. And one, staggering into the road, is struck by the ambulance itself. He is dead before the inexperienced medics can figure out what to do about him.

They spare him little time, before giving up and heading for the next emergency.

Like a house of cards, with the foundations weakened the whole town comes crumbling down.

There is an x-eyed smiley face scratched into Jenny Turner's bedroom window, one of the first marked for the strength of the resentment Leonard felt toward her. She has slept poorly this past month, this _final_ month. With smoke in the air and sirens wailing through the town, is it any wonder that she rises in the night and goes downstairs for a glass of water?

When she looks blearily out the kitchen window into the dark as the glass fills, she meets the gaze of two swiveling goggled eyes full of fire.

It is some time later when her father is awoken by the hint of light and the sound of running water. He ambles into the kitchen to see Jenny standing stock-still in front of the sink, running tap-water overflowing the glass in her hand. Her mouth moves in mumbled words that make no sense.

"What are you doing, Jenny?" He says gently, thinking her sleepwalking. "Sweet-pea?"

His daughter's head tips up slowly, toward the ceiling, and then with a popping crunch further back so she looks at her father upside down. "Yes, daddy?" her mouth says, sickly sweet with an upside-down smile. And when he screams, her head twists to right-side up and still looking backward. Her joints pop and snap backward as she lunges toward him, hands twisting into claws.

But look away, look away from poor Jenny. Her body moves and speaks, but she is dead. Hayseed is moving, and in the Anderson house, Mr. Anderson begins screaming in a language no human tongue should shape. Gasoline pours from his eyes like tears and spontaneous flames lick up and up his body until he is caught in an inferno that burns him to a human-shaped husk of ash... and touches nothing else in the house. Above him on the ceiling the smoke has scorched two rough x's, and a wavering gash like a crooked smile.

All these, all these and more. It is a long night's work. Before it ends, Hayseed pauses outside the home of Belial.

Belial, who has spent the night awake, celebrating the sirens and the towering fires that light the thick-smoked air in an orange glow, and shivering with joy at every explosion. With his eyes gazing up and outward, he does not notice the street lights on his street flicker and blow out one by one. He does not notice much of _anything_ too close to home, preoccupied as he is with the suffering further afield.

He does not notice, until he hears his father's voice calling for him. Belial rolls his eyes with a groan and leaves his window watch to see what the 'old bastard' wants now.

Belial looks first into the living room, but his father isn't sitting in his usual recliner. He looks into the kitchen, briefly, and the entryway, and sees no sign of his father. He checks his father's bedroom, then, and finds it equally empty.

"John," the voice calls, small and hoarse. "John... help."

"Dad? Where are you?" Belial follows his father's voice back to the living room. The couch and recliner are both empty. Belial walks into the room, confused.

"Help... help me."

Something drips on the side of Belial's face, warm and wet, and finally he looks _up_.

It is hard for him to understand what he's looking at. The shadows are strange around the contorted shape shuddering on the ceiling. There, a leg sprawled out with far too many odd-shaped bends in it, the other heading the opposite direction out of the center mass. An arm flung out and twisted around the back of a head, shaking fingers digging into the plasterboard of the ceiling. The other hand—left hand, clad in thick, flickering shadows—reaches up to claw at the head.

Eyes, bulging lidless eyes anchor Belial's horrified understanding of a bloodied face. The cheeks have been bitten through, widening the mouth into a massive caricature of a smile. As Belial screams, the hand scratches at his father's face, fingers gouging around an eye until it pops. The socket gushes blood and clear jelly as the hand tears a bloody X over it.

"Belial." It is Hayseed's voice that comes out of his father's mouth, now, cackling and teasing. "Belial, are you enjoying your revenge?"

Belial's father's body contorts, like he's fighting the possession, and his limbs twist and crack as they splay further out. His soft belly strains under the pressure, and the skin and muscle splits with a gush of blood and the pink shine of spilling guts. The left hand reaches up to claw his second eye out in an X just like the first.

"...please, please..." his father's voice, again, from the broken body. His ruined eyes and mouth begin bleeding gasoline, then, and as flames engulf the tortured shape, Belial runs. Though he had resented and sometimes even hated him, there was still some small part of the John who named himself Belial that _did_ love his father. Maybe that love could have been Belial's salvation if he had more time, if his father had been a better man, if he had himself made better choices—if this was a different story.

Belial the Wicked flees into the rising dawn of the final day of October splattered in a fine spray of his father's blood, crying the first real tears he has shed in many years.

It is time, now, for the end.


	8. counterterrorism

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> fighting back

It is a Hallowe'en uncelebrated that arrives this year. Those few decorations put up in the early part of the fated month seem sad now, tacky and in poor taste with the death and terror that haunt the town.

It is the final day, and Mara the Bitter is witch enough to feel that in the deadly energies boiling in the town.

In the morning of the last day of October, Mara takes a pair of clippers to the long red claws she has spent so long growing. She trims her nails down flush with the end of her fingers, and paints them black. She puts on sturdy jeans and a pair of heavy black boots chosen more for the potential impact of a kick than their visual impact—though they do make both well. She puts the hair that almost always covers at least half of her face up in a sensible ponytail.

Her only nod to vanity is painting her mouth with her reddest lipstick and blackest lip liner.

As she puts her makeup away, her gaze falls to her small collection of crystals. On pure magical instinct, she picks out a natural black tourmaline crystal. The deep black striated stone suits her style, and is useful for protection against negative energy and for purification. It can't hurt. She tucks it into her back pocket.

Mara leaves home for the last time with her school backpack full of food pilfered from the pantry, a blanket, and a few water bottles. From the hall closet, she digs out a big heavy army coat that her father used to wear. She steals a whole half box of cigarettes from her mother's purse on her way out, and a worn baseball bat from her father's case of carefully collected sports memorabilia. She knows, down in her bones, that one way or another she isn't going to get in trouble for it.

When Mara shows up at Leonard the Clever's house, he immediately understands what she intends just by seeing how she has prepared.

"They'll be coming for us," she says. "We have to hide."

She helps Leonard pack up his books and his research, and he gives his gran one last hug before he follows Mara out.

There is a small fort out in the back of an overgrown and unused property at the edge of town that Leonard and Mara played in as children, and were too old to bother sharing with Belial when he joined their friend group. The little shed is tumble-down and moldy. The roof wouldn't hold against even a light rain, but the sky gives up no blessing of water to quench the fires that burn.

It will be enough for them, for one final day. They sweep the dead leaves out of it with broken tree branches, and settle in. Leonard is still researching feverishly. He still hopes that he can find a way to stop the destruction. How unfortunate for him that books written about demon summoning are so often written by people under demonic influence. There is much for encouraging a demon, and so little written about how to get rid of one.

Still, Leonard tries. It is grueling work, but his understanding has always been unparalleled. He takes a line from one book, a hint from another, and a tentative plan begins to form in his notebook.

Mara sits in the crooked doorway, the cigarette dangling from her lips adding a negligible amount of smoke to the tainted air. She breaks out her bottle of red nail polish and meticulously paints two runes on her baseball bat. On the handle one for protection, and on the business end, destruction.

There is a power to an object that has long been cherished, the focus of good feelings. The bat hit a game-wining home run in the hand of a beloved player, once upon a time, and has been treasured ever since. It is an object with powerful memories attached to it, and that makes it stronger in magic.

It will not be enough. Mara knows that. But she looks back at Leonard, feverishly planning, and nods to herself. She places the bat across her knees, and waits. Mara has loyalty enough, in the end, to choose where she will make a stand. Maybe that loyalty could have been her salvation if she had more time to grow up, if she had cultivated _it_ rather than the cruelty of her well-earned bitterness—if she had not befriended Belial, who had always encouraged the worst in her.

If this was a kinder story.

It will not be enough, but these are the tools she has. Mara feeds the fire of her rage and bitterness as she traces a fingertip over and over the destruction rune on her stolen bat, repeating and reinforcing it in sets of seven, and waits.

When Belial fled from his home he had no plan. He makes it three blocks away before the thick smoke and the fact that he hates exercise and has no endurance forces him to a stop. He hacks and coughs, from tears and smoke, and when he casts his desperate gaze around him he notices that all the lights are on in Pastor Robinson's house, and the perfect plan occurs to him all at once.

Belial makes a pathetic sight, sobbing on the pastor's doorstep. He is not the only one who has flocked to it for safety. Those who still trust the man of God, after the defilement of his church, have gathered to pray together all night. Pastor Robinson welcomed them all, making his home a sanctuary where they have been safe.

He lets Belial in, too. Belial is cleaned and tended to, and a few of his tears are even real as he spins a yarn about Hayseed that somehow leaves him a blameless victim. The responsibility is all placed at the feet of Mara and Leonard.

Belial speaks to a home full of people absolutely terrified and full of religious fervor, and offers them up three targets. That weird goth girl, that weird morbid bookworm, and a demon now given a name, shape, and origin. It is not hard to turn them to a single purpose.

Pastor Robinson has fire and brimstone in his soul. He is desperate for revenge against the evil that defiled his church, hurt his beloved daughter, and frightened and harmed so many of his flock. The idea of a crusade to bring salvation to the town is more temptation than he can resist. Belial gives him the final piece, and the final push.

While Belial sleeps on the couch, as he had no slept all night, Pastor Robinson's flock leave in groups and return with whatever weapons and armor they can scrounge up. Sharpened meat cleavers and chopping knives, carpenter's hammers and cat's claws and crowbars, gardener's pole pruners and sturdy rakes—all can be put to deadly use. A bat is just a club by another name, and even a thrown rock can be fatal. Bicycling and skateboarding and motorcycle helmets all offer protection, as do knee and elbow guards, and thick padded coats with or without lengths of chain wrapped about them, and the repurposed parts of sports uniforms.

Any community can, with motivation, arm themselves to do terrible violence with everyday objects close at hand.

Pastor Robinson spends the day blessing every weapon and piece of armor his people—his holy army—bring to his home as they prepare. The terrified are made brave with the promise of divine assistance. The pastor believes he is doing the work of God as he incites them into a frenzy.

All, save Belial, believe that they are doing the right thing, the _holy_ thing. They march out in unison beneath the smoke-darkened daytime sky, the sun as red as blood above them.

It would be kind to believe that no harm comes to Mara and Leonard's families when the group does not find their quarry in their homes. It would be kind to think that Leonard's fragile old gran is left alone when she cannot turn Leonard over, and insists over and over that he's a good boy who would _never—_ that Mara's exhausted parents, sheriff's deputy and nurse, hard workers completely confused when they are awoken from restless sleep, were not harmed.

To believe that is to severely misunderstand the nature of a mob.

They are dragged into the street and beaten to death, all three, in the rage of the 'holy warriors' who cannot find their desired quarry. Pastor Robinson's powerful voice rings out over the screams as they die, calling down the judgment of God upon the sinners. The mob is hungry for retribution, and in marching among them Belial has never felt so alive. The fear and horror he felt when he witnessed his father's torture is gone, subsumed by pure glee in the mayhem.

They hunt, sweeping the town for any hints of Mara, Leonard, and as the red sun sets—for the demon Hayseed. There are many eyes, all working together, and all with an actual idea what they're looking for.

Mara and Leonard's hide is far enough off the beaten track, and their occupation of the space quiet enough, that they remain unfound into the final bloody night. It is Hayseed, skulking through the alleys, who rattles a trap made of string and tin cans when he dragging right foot catches on it. In an instant, the hunters with their priest-blessed weaponry converge upon him.

Hayseed runs, lopsided and limping.

"Demon!" the cry echoes behind him. "The demon!" They call out to each other, sharing his location and what direction he's going.

Every way Hayseed turns, Pastor Robinson's people are already coming toward him. He abandons the streets entirely, fleeing toward the scrubby outskirts of town. Belial chases him, eyes fixed on the burning-coal light in Hayseed's chest like a beacon in the dark. Belial runs, meat cleaver in his hand and the sound of the mob he's been running with in his ears. He calls out the directions he sees Hayseed running, and he hears others around him doing the same.

Hayseed is fast, but Belial's bloodlust and bravery among the mob drives him on. He hardly feels the smoke burning in his lungs as he chases Hayseed, intent on his revenge.

Hayseed might have escaped into the woods unscathed, if he had not happened to cross the edge of a paranoid person's property—if the paranoid person in question hadn't set bear traps along his borders. If one of those traps' spring-hinged teeth had not snapped shut on Hayseed's right leg.

He lets out a squeal like the rabbit whose heart races in his chest as he collapses, clutching his thigh above the trap.

Belial laughs aloud. "We've got him now!" He cheers, and he hears the kill-hungry baying of the mob behind him as he bears down on Hayseed.

Hayseed's goggled eyes roll wildly in his masked face. He screams again as, with a twist and a sound like tearing fabric, he rips his right leg off above the knee. He crawls into the scrubby woods, severed leg bleeding blackened straw, with Belial hot on his singular remaining heel.


	9. reinforcements

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> it's funner with friends

As the sun sets, bringing in Hallowe'en night, Leonard sits up from his notebook with a deep breath that is different enough from the small frustrated sounds he's been making all day that Mara looks up from her watch at the door, eyebrows raised.

"I... I have it?" Leonard says. He looks back down at his notebook, where the results of his feverish research are written out into a new ritual. He makes a face when he stands, body gone stiff from sitting still so long. He hands his notebook to Mara to double-check as he begins going through the supplies they brought with them. "It should work. It really should," he says. "I just... what do we use as a focus? I've got candles and chalk but not, nothing for a focus?"

Mara understands maybe half of Leonard's sketched-out diagram, but what she sees is promising. The runes and words are in sets of three rather than the seven that brought Hayseed into the physical world—the imagery of circles rather than pentacles. It is a powerful cleansing that Leonard proposes.

"Even salt would work?" Leonard picks up a half-eaten bag of chips from Mara's backpack, considers, then puts it down. "It has to be pure, though. I don't have anything—"

Mara interrupts his increasingly high-pitched nervous rambling by offering him his notebook in one hand, and her black tourmaline crystal resting in the other palm. Her magical instinct has provided her the best possible stone for the purpose, and she gives it to Leonard without hesitation.

Leonard smiles, brilliant with hope, as he accepts them both. "We can do this," he says.

"Yeah. Let's—" Mara starts, broken off with a gasp. Something has changed, and the demonic energies in the town hit her like a punch in the gut. Without a thought she spins away, grabbing up her rune-focused bat. "It has to be you," she says. "Do it careful, egghead, but do it _fast_."

Mara plants herself like a tree in the broken doorway, fear flowing over her like waves. But she has years' worth of practice in transmuting her fear into rage.

The whites show all the way around her eyes, but she bares her teeth, bat held tight in both hands, and stands ready

  
  


Hayseed leaves the scarecrow's right leg behind, and crawls into the scrubby stand of woods where first he was summoned. With every gasping breath into his starvation-hollow body, burning-coal red lights him up like a beacon, and Belial follows.

The frenzy of Belial's bloodlust is only fed by Hayseed's desperate whimpers. When Hayseed collapses against an outcrop of rock that he cannot seem to climb over without his leg, when he cries and cowers away from Belial, all the boy feels is cruel joy and no pity for the pathetic sight. Belial has tasted murder with the mob, and he is hungry for more.

Belial advances on Hayseed, so eager to be sure the mob he hears behind him does not steal the kill from him, that it never occurs to him that what he _hears_ would not be what he _saw_ if he cared to look back. That he has followed a lure than no others saw. That he ran into the woods all alone, with Pastor Robinson's 'holy warriors' none the wiser.

He thinks nothing but joy in the impending pain he will inflict, up until the instant Hayseed's sob transforms into a wild scream of laughter.

Belial's feet stick to the ground, two steps from Hayseed, and his legs crumple to drop him to his knees in the center of a prepared pentacle. A full moon shines dark above them, pure light obscured with smoke and ash. Hayseed's high cackling laugh rings with demonic power. It is a spell spoken not in words but in pure chaos power, calling for a Lord of Destruction by name. Hayseed spreads his flesh and mechanical arms wide, and fire races around Belial in lines of gasoline drawn between the five charred animal skulls that ring him.

It is Hallowe'en night, and the Lord of Chaos given the name of Hayseed is finally at the height of his power. The laws governing a demon's interaction with the physical plane are subtle and complex, and not meant for the understanding of mortals. Suffice it to say that the more closely a vessel matches the creature possessing it, the less that creature's strength is hindered. Call it... Karmic Sympathy. A scrawny one-armed scarecrow was close enough to _right_ to draw Hayseed in.

The child of chaos did not rend his way free of the pits that birthed him unscathed. Without the scarecrow's right leg dragging him down, sapping his strength as he fights to use a piece he cannot claim, Hayseed can bring all his might to bear.

He'd gathered power enough to do what he wanted, regardless. A vessel that very nearly matches his self only makes it _easy_.

Belial screams 'no' as a foreign power rises up through his body, burning like acid in his veins. His final voluntary act is to bury the priest-blessed meat cleaver in his own thigh in an attempt to halt it—much good it does him. Jagged claws hook themselves into his soul, anchors to tether that which is called. Karmic Sympathy, again: his soured soul offers easy access to a demon. Cruelty anchors to cruelty, bloodlust to bloodlust, selfishness to selfishness. There is no goodness in the heart of he who proudly called himself Belial to resist the possession.

He is taken at once, both sacrifice and vessel.

A human sacrifice is a thing of terrible power. The Lord of Destruction who answers Hayseed's summons comes through into the physical plane at full strength. Belial's form, the body of an average and unathletic teenaged boy, is not nearly enough to contain him.

Belial's chest tears open, ribs rent apart as they reform around a far larger barrel. The simple animal organs inside boil, twisting into new forms and functions for the demon's use. Every one of Belial's joints pulls out of socket at once as the bones thicken and lengthen, sharp shards bursting out of them, to meet other shards and interlock in profane new geometries of astounding strength. Belial's muscles, pulled out beyond their limits, shred apart, bleeding, and grow into massive new shapes. His skin stretches, like a balloon over filled, and then gives and splits in strange fault lines to cover the new body in ragged seeping wounds with the new muscle fibers exposed in them.

The meat cleaver, embedded in his thigh, melts and reforms into broad staples to hold the edges of the largest wounds together.

Bone spurs erupt even through the heavy muscles that now cover them, bursting out through the abused skin at the knuckles of heavy hands, in a ridge of spikes along the curves of huge shoulders.

All the blood vessels burst in Belial's eyes at once. They go blood red, and then flat dead black with a gleam like swamp fire deep inside them. His face is unrecognizable, warped by the change of the bones beneath. It stretches out at the forehead, and then black horns rip their way through the flesh to grow into a broad curve sweeping back from his crown. One big hand reaches up and peels what's left of the face skin and flesh off the transformed skull like it was nothing but a latex costume piece.

The teeth are rearranging themselves in Belial's mouth as the demon opens it to chew up the face and swallow it down. They grow into long sharp fangs pointing up and down, and some twist to the outside to grow into great tusks to frame the snarling skull face.

Terrible though he was, it would be kind to believe that Belial died quickly; that he was not conscious to feel every bit of it happen to the body that is no longer his. Yes, that would be the _kind_ thing to believe.

The fire of Hayseed's summon gutters as the new demon fully inhabits his new vessel. The ragged remnants of Belial's torn clothes reform into an apron of some heavy oily material that is not of this world.

The Lord of Destruction stands on legs as thick and strong as trees, towering tall, and the earth trembles in horror at his step upon it.

"Butcher, Butcher!" Hayseed leaps up and throws his scrawny body directly into the other demon's massive arms. Like a cat, he rubs his burlap mask face all over Butcher's chest as he wraps both arms around his neck. "Oh, my beauty! I've _missed_ you!"

Butcher closes one broad hand around Hayseed's skinny middle. "Took your damn time," he says, in a voice like breaking rock.

Hayseed titters, manic giggles as he bites at the edges of Butcher's wounds, trying to get closer to him despite the limits of their physical vessels. "Did what I could! They didn't give me nothing but a rabbit's heart to start with. Not a bad job for starting so weak?"

Butcher looks up and away from Hayseed, seeing with senses other than sight. He weighs and measures the delicious pain and suffering of the town, the death, the destruction and the overwhelming _potential_ for destruction, against the pitiful power of a rabbit's heart.

"Huh," he says.

Hayseed wiggles all over, thrilled at the praise. "Saved the best part for you." He grins at Butcher, coals flickering between the stitches of his sewn mouth. "Always save the best for you, mate."

"Mm." Butcher rumbles, pleased, as he pushes two thick fingers into Hayseed's mouth. They're big enough they stretch the burlap fabric and strain the stitches, as he digs in to bury them in the searing-forge heat. Hayseed moans a garbled sound, narrow throat working as he tries to suck them in deeper. They can feel each other's power, some, but the bodies that allow them free rein in the physical plane mean they are utterly unable to merge and mingle essences.

Butcher and Hayseed could not be more different, in their forms. Hayseed is a survivor of chaos, always hollow in his unending hunger even as he ascends to the power of a Lord. Butcher was born a Lord of Destruction, with power to his name and the strength to glut himself. He has never known want, and the magnificent scale of his chosen frame echoes it.

When first they met, Butcher thought to crush and consume the wretched thing that dared claw its way to power. But he saw something in Hayseed, a potential, the option of a different choice. He saw all Hayseed had done, his creativity in building himself up from less than nothing, and wondered what else he might do and how high he might rise if given the sliver of a chance. He wanted to _watch_. He allied himself to Hayseed instead, binding himself to the insatiable starveling's fate.

With every new catastrophe Hayseed orchestrates, Butcher's choice is proven wise. A Lord of Chaos and a Lord of Destruction are a potent combination. Together they rise meteoric; all things shared equally between them.

Hayseed claws at Butcher with both his meat and metal hands, wraps his leg and a half around Butcher's big belly to squeeze tight. He keens at the intensity, a sharp wail, when Butcher hooks his fingers around the jaw bone he's grown beneath the mask, squeezing it with enough force to shatter it had it belonged to anything mortal. Butcher answers with a ragged moan of his own—tempted, terribly, to rend him open and be rent asunder that they might join in truth.

Not yet, though. Not while there is still destruction to be wrought. He reluctantly pulls his fingers out of Hayseed's greedy mouth, and puts him down to make him stand on his singular foot before giving him an expectant look.

"Right, right, hahaha!" Hayseed laughs, bouncing in place. "Made us prezzies for the main event!" With a wave of his metal hand, he summons a handful of mechanical objects that he's created from his scavenged toolsheds and broken vehicles. For himself, he made a simple peg leg and a frag launcher that never runs out of ammunition. For Butcher, a meathook on a chain, and a scrap gun touched with chaos. A touch of his own destruction power blended in to it, and the results will be _explosive_.

Butcher rumbles his approval of the equipment, as he swings the hook from hand to hand. "Target?" he asks.

The smile that twists Hayseed burlap mask is pure devilish glee. "Oho, that's the best part, mate! They set me against everyone they ever thought did 'em wrong." He titters as both his and Butcher's power sweeps out, finding the astonishing lack of limits on the deal that bound Hayseed. "It's _everyone_. The whole town's ours!"

Butcher laughs a big belly-laugh, then, skull face turned up to the sky, whole body shaking with his vicious joy. Hayseed's high cackle twines its way through Butcher's booming bellows as he dances around the big demon.

In unison they turn toward the town, armed and eager.


	10. Carnage

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> ashes, ashes  
> we all fall down

Mara is not caught by surprise when the demons come for her.

Of the three, only she is bitter enough in her heart to figure out that the summoners themselves are not exempt from their own revenge. They've all hurt each other, one way or another. She stands watch over Leonard, and when she sees the lopsided lumbering shape of Hayseed coming toward the tumbledown shed in the dark, she does not hesitate for an instant.

Mara takes a sprinter's start, with no breath wasted for a shout or a warning. Every bit of her potent rage and her physical strength are aimed dead at the demon. Mara is not taken by surprise, but _Hayseed_ is. Between a protection rune and all the magical strength of a desperate half-trained witch holding nothing back, he doesn't see her coming. Mara swings the bat in a perfect home run strike, destruction rune connecting with Hayseed's chest in a resounding crack that sends him sprawling to the ground with bloodied coals splattering around him.

Humans, in extreme circumstances, can draw on hysterical strength—giving everything their body is capable of with no regard for the injury it will do them. In another time, in another life, Mara could have been a berserker. She doesn't feel the burning spots of the coals that struck her, doesn't feel the pain of muscles torn. Spit flies from the corners of her mouth as she leaps onto Hayseed's prone body. She swings the bat again, aiming to destroy his head. Maybe she even would have succeeded, if a spiked meat hook had not caught the bat before it made contact.

To her credit, Mara does not falter when faced with an unexpected second demon, this one at least three times as massive as the first. She changes target without hesitation, swinging for Butcher's nearest knee with the intent to cripple. Alas, that the rune of destruction she has poured so much focus into cannot harm a Lord of that domain.

The baseball bat shatters in her hands.

Butcher grabs her by the face, huge hand wrapped all the way around her head. He lifts her up by the grip, inspecting her like a curious specimen. Mara _bites._ Her teeth are human blunt, nothing at all like the massive fangs in Butcher's mouth, but she brings enough grinding force to bear that she tears through even the thickly reinforced skin Butcher has clothed himself with. She screams around the mouthful of flesh, strangled and feral, with the sulfuric burn of demon blood in her mouth. She claws at Butcher's arm with fingernails cut short enough to be strong but still long enough to do damage. She kicks twice between his legs with enough force that a mortal would certainly have been incapacitated, if only briefly, and then one final kick out to the side so that Hayseed, picking himself up, flops back down on to the ground to dodge it.

There was some part of Mara the Bitter that always expected she would die fighting. Freeze was not an reaction she allowed herself. Never again. And so with Flight also impossible, Fight is all she has left. Fight is the option she has drilled over and over in her mind. Fight she does, like a rabid thing, until Butcher's hand clenches.

Her face, spine, and brain stem are all crushed to a pulp instantly. It is a quick death, and a complete one. The best doctor in the world could not bring Mara back from that.

Butcher carelessly tosses the jerking body aside, letting it ragdoll-flop in the dark woods. It is of no more interest to him.

"Hooley Dooley," Hayseed opines, as he clambers upright. His pale ash-smeared chest is marked with a starburst of fine cracks—like kintsugi, shattered potter pieced back together with gold—only his is lined with flames. "The feisty ones are fun!"

"Hmph," Butcher agrees, but he flicks Hayseed in the side of the head to remind him to be a little more careful with his vessel. Hayseed giggles, unrepentant.

The flickering light of three candles dances in the sagging doorway and through the cracked walls of the little abandoned shed. Within, Leonard writes feverishly in circles of chalk on the warped floorboards.

His setup is simple; the black tourmaline crystal framed with three candles in a triangle. With a piece of string as compass, he drew three perfectly-round concentric circles to surround it. Each circle is split in thirds. His rune set must be written once per third in the inner circle, twice per third in the middle, and three times in each third of the outer circle.

Three and three and three and three-by-three: the power of the cleansing Leonard the Clever has devised is multiplicative, exponential. Sweat beads on his brow as he writes, each repeated rune careful and perfect and as fast as he can write it. His hand cramps up from the tension in his muscles, but he keeps going, never slowing.

Leonard hears Mara's fierce intake of breath, her final run, the hard _thwock_ of the bat making contact. He hears her final muffled scream of rage.

He hears the sick wet crunch of her death, and Hayseed's laughter.

Hot tears prickle in his eyes and roll down to drip from his nose as he keeps writing. The chalk snaps in his fingers, gripped too tight, but he does not falter. He pinches the little broken pieces he has left between his fingertips and keeps writing. He pushes on knowing that his only friend is dead. He knows that he doesn't have enough time to finish the final third of the runes, but he tries anyway, with all his might.

That is bravery. Leonard finally found it, at the base of his soul and at the end of the line. That bravery could have been his salvation, if only he had more time to explore it. If only he'd found it a month before, and stood up to his friends when they suggested taking his research on demons out of the theoretical and into the practical. If only he'd listened to his instincts when he _knew_ it was a bad decision.

If only this was a kinder story.

There is a sound like a dull gunshot, and a ball bounces into the shed. It's bright yellow, and as it spins to a stop in front of Leonard, he sees for just an instant that it is marked with a crude X-eyed smiley face. His eyes close, whole body cringing away, but his hand still writes runes to the last.

When the frag blows, the explosion destroys the shed entirely. The rune-written floor is torn apart, the power of the spell dissipated in chaos, and the crooked walls blow outward covered with a fine layer of blood and viscera.

  
  


The final of the three summoners is dead, but Hallowe'en night is far from over, and the demons' fun is only beginning.

  
  


The little local hospital is easy pickings. It is filled beyond capacity with the injured and dying, and the nurses and doctors exhausted and pushed beyond their limits.

The doors on both ends of the building blow inward. Butcher strides his way through the front door wreckage, scrap gun in hand. The bright florescent lights flare and short out, burning a deep red that according to the normal physics of the world they should not have been able to achieve. Butcher fires. Each spreading shot, powered by cloven chaos and destruction, can rip through more than one human. He laughs as he paints the overcrowded waiting room in burst bodies—blood gleaming black beneath the strange lights.

Those who _can_ run, run. Screaming, scrambling, they make for the back door.

Hayseed's cackling shriek meets them. He bounces off the walls and the ceiling, explosive in his destructive power. Fire bursts from oxygen tanks, turning them into bombs, killing anyone trying to hide in a room. Alcohol-based sanitizing solutions spontaneously combust. Hayseed's frags take down anyone who gets too close—the last thing they see two wild-pinwheeling eyes and a lopsided smile like a gash of flame.

Those few who manage to flee Hayseed met up with those few running from Butcher, a knot of terrified bodies clumped in the center of the hospital. The lights strobe and spark from Hayseed's side, darken to red on Butcher's. A high cackling laugh meets a deep and deadly chuckling from the other. The people scream, pushing at each other, all trying to get to the center of the group for safety, to get past each other, to get _away_.

Futile, all of it.

Scrap gun blasts and bright yellow frags make short work of them. Those who stand and are killed outright, and those who collapse and try to hide beneath them, alike. Hayseed and Butcher meet in the middle. Arms around each other they dance, dance on the broken bodies as the hospital goes up like a torch around them.

The hospital burns like a bright beacon over the town.

There is no help for the hurt, no more hope of healing for the injured.

  
  


The hunters, the preacher's holy warriors, are all out patrolling the streets in the dark. Some are emboldened by the early success of their murders, of having 'chased away' Hayseed. They walk alone in their chosen patrols, puffed up and proud with their improvised weapons in hand.

They are in shouting distance of others—but that shout is never given. They die too fast, taken by a sudden looming figure out of the dark—a massive hand closed around a neck to crush it to paste, or a smaller hand clapped over a mouth while a burning-furnace mouth rips their throat out—leaving a ragged cauterized wound behind on the dead body.

The bodies are slow to be found, and the finders do not last long themselves.

Some of them chose to work in pairs. But even a moment apart, one sent off to investigate something, or to take a leak, and they do not return. Their partner goes to look for them, sooner or later, to come across a skeletal-thin demon in a burlap mask hunkered over the body, pulling up handfuls of viscera to cram into his burning maw. A scream, of many screams out in the dark, and then they are either Hayseed's next victim, or Butcher's.

Their ranks thin, and they begin to gather together in larger groups for what safety they think it will give them. Here, a small group beneath one of the few remaining street lights, backs together and improvised weapons in hand. They are on the alert, but that does them no good. A frag shot down into the center of the group can rip them apart—or a chain hook can pick them off one by one—breaking their spines as it drags them away into the dark.

The slurping, crunching, and laughing in the dark haunts the last terrified remaining warrior—for the brief moment they have left.

The pain and paranoia, the fear, are all fuel. The demons drink it in, glutting themselves more on that that than on the bloody meat that Hayseed feasts upon. Hayseed eats and eats, and is never satisfied.

Pastor Robinson is among the last of his warriors caught. He, and the last handful of his followers. The preacher convinces himself, until the end, that those who were dying—whose bodies were found in gruesome poses, crushed or half eaten—were not the true believers. That his faith will save him.

It would not be _faith_ if he did not believe without a single shred of proof.

He is surrounded by the last ten, his holy book clutched to his chest and a pruning pole-saw in his other hand. His voice is hoarse in the smokey air as he shouts a prayer for divine judgment, for revenge and destruction.

There is a sound like a motorcyle revving, out in the dark, and a tire on fire propels itself into the group, chased by Hayseed's laughter. Pastor Robinson prays to the end, but in the end prayer is no shield at all against heavy explosives. The tire blows with enough force to leave a crater in the street. The fragile human bodies that had been standing there never stood a chance.

Why, you may ask, did faith and the invocation of divinity not halt the demons? Why did the weapons and armor that the pastor spent the day blessing not provide more protection? Look to the intentions of the supposed man of god when he blessed them—his soul burning with the desire for revenge. Look to what he set his people to do, murdering the innocent in the streets.

There is no goodness, no right, no divine blessing bestowed for such acts.

Had Pastor Robinson kept to his home, tending to it as a sanctuary—had Belial not stumbled through his door to incite him to violence—he and his faithful might have survived. But he did not, and they did not, and they died in violence in the very streets they sought to reclaim with violence from the forces of evil.

  
  


Some families have boarded up their houses from the inside to hide from the horrid night. The entire Smith family are all in their basement, like hiding from a tornado. They have barricaded the windows and the doors and blocked the vents and sealed themselves in.

They huddle in the dark: the twins Bill and James hugging each other, their parents nearby, their old gran snoozing in a recliner with the family cat on her lap. They wait together, hearing the muffled screams and explosions outside, absolutely sick with fear and worry—and with carbon monoxide poisoning. The furnace is in the basement with them, and it runs and breathes out unsensed poison until the stuffy little basement is full of it. The only carbon monoxide alarm in the house is upstairs, in the kitchen, and far from the deadly concentration of gas.

Their house does not burn up, and does not fall down, but there is no one alive left in it.

Other houses do burn—the empty, and those full. Mr. Kelly, the middle school teacher, barricaded his doors with kitchen chairs propped under the doorknobs. He doesn't try to escape the fire when it sweeps his block. He is lying on his couch with three empty bottles: his xanax prescription, the painkillers for his broken knee, and whiskey. There were even odds he wouldn't have made it the night either way.

Mr. Kelly dies of smoke inhalation without ever coming close to consciousness, and his body burns along with his house. And he is one of the lucky ones in that.

The Bouchard family and Mr. Davis separately nailed boards over the doors and the windows for safety, so when the fire sweeps through supernaturally fast, they cannot escape. Their fire alarms were useless and already turned off, with so much smoke in the air. The smell if it was already strong enough they didn't even realize something had changed until far too late. They die crying and coughing, prying hopelessly at the boards they locked themselves in with.

They, they and more. Those who hide do not survive any more than those who try to fight back.

  
  


We have seen those who Fight and die. We have seen those who Freeze and hide and die. The only other response is Flight.

The road out of town is blocked with fire and concrete barriers. Those who flee at the end do so on foot.

Alone, or in groups, they strike out. Most follow the road, the familiar path made strange with smoke and darkness, made longer and more perilous traveled at a speed so much slower than a car. They walk, desperate to get away from the doomed town.

The stretch of road winds through the scrubby woods—and it was dangerous even before the end, with half a dozen crashes precipitated by seeing a demonic figure standing in the road.

People walk the road, with bags or backpacks of supplies grabbed in panic or with nothing but a flashlight or a lamp for light. This time, there are two demonic figures standing in the road. One thin and hunched and lopsided, with fire in his mouth and chest. One massively towering, with a warped and bloodied skull for a face, great horns rising from his crown. Both deadly.

Those who take the road do not make it far past the city limits. Must we witness them die, as well? Like everyone else, they die in blood and fear. Hayseed and Butcher are unstoppable alone, and together, incredible. They glory in their combined chaos and destruction.

Not everyone takes the road, of course. There are some people who, knowing the area well, trust to the hiking trails and hunting tracks to get away.

Jimmy King almost isn't one of them. He wanted out, of course he did, but he planned to stay with his auntie. She needed him, and he couldn't see any way to get her safely out of town once the barricade went up. She couldn't walk far on her own, and with the smoke in the air she was dependent on oxygen. The best plan he could come up with was stealing a wheelchair from the hospital to wheel her along.

She laughed, when he whispered the suggestion to her. His dear old auntie, in a crowded room in the little local hospital where they were trying so hard to keep her and so many others alive.

"You should go, Jimmy," she told him, resting one trembling hand on his head. "You take your young man, and get out."

When he blushed and stammered, she laughed, watery old eyes sparkling. "Did you think I didn't know where you sneak off at night?" she teased, but then, turning serious again. "Don't you worry about me. I'll be fine here, but you should get out of town while you can."

He shook his head, refusing outright. The nurses are so overloaded that he knows he needs to be there to manage his aunti's medications. She won't get them when she needs them if he isn't there to do it for her.

Is it a hope, a premonition, or merely _luck_ that she sent him home to fetch some imagined necessity? Either way, he is not in it when the hospital goes up like a roman candle. Jimmy King stands in the street, blocks away, hands over his mouth as he watches the hospital burn in abject horror.

He doesn't scream, and he doesn't run in to die trying to rescue someone he knows down in his heart is already dead. At the end of the line, Jimmy finds in himself a terrible _practicality_. He drops the bag of books his auntie sent him for, and steps off the street to disappear. He knows the neighborhood like the back of his hand, and has spent enough time creeping around it at night to know where he can walk unnoticed.

Being attacked by would-be vigilantes has only honed his senses. He makes it to Duke's house without happening upon the demons, and without being spotted by the 'holy warriors' that are out in force. Either would have killed him without question.

Did you think it was only the family of Mara and Leonard that the mob killed? No. Anyone they suspected, anyone who couldn't explain quickly and convincingly enough what they were doing out, has been slain. Quite a few of the would-be fugitives met their ends that way. Jimmy is careful, and lucky, and when he gets to Duke's house, he manages to convince his boyfriend to leave with him instead of hunkering down to hide.

They don't dare the road. With nothing but each other, a flashlight, and a water bottle, they get out of town. They take an old logging road that winds across the hills and clear out of the county.

They are not the only ones who take hiking trails and smaller paths away. Most stumble into a bear trap, or a deadfall, or just get picked off by a scrap gun or a yellow frag grenade or a hooked chain out of the dark. The woods are not safe.

Jimmy and Duke move slowly. A few other groups and individuals, on the same track, pass them by. Little Tim's friend, Rita, is crying as her mother grimly tows her along. Neither of them spare even a glance for the slow-moving boys. Jimmy and Duke, making steady progress, come across the ripped up and blown apart bodies. Jimmy doesn't call attention to the wet shine of blood slicking the fallen leaves beside the trail, to the stink of raw meat and ruptured bowels... to a little arm in a pink jacket, unconnected to any body, just to the side of the path. Jimmy King does not break, not then, not yet. He keeps his focus on Duke, and keeps them going.

Duke has a mask, but it can only help so much against the heavy smoke in the air. He wheezes with every struggling breath, asthma closing up his airways, but he keeps going and Jimmy keeps pace with him. Duke has to pause frequently to catch his breath. Every step is a fight, and it takes all he has to keep fighting it. He is collapsed against a tree, coughing and gasping, when the Butcher looms out of the smoke and the darkness.

It's Jimmy who sees the demon first. Duke's vision is swimming from lack of air. Jimmy leaves off rubbing Duke's back and grabs up a nearby stick. Half-rotten as it is, he brandishes it as he puts himself between Duke and Butcher.

"Don't you _touch_ him," Jimmy snarls.

Butcher tilts his head to the side, taking in the sight. Jimmy is just a scrawny scrap of a thing, pale and skinny and shaking. He's got two black eyes from the broken nose the vigilantes gave him, a hairline-cracked arm that the overworked doctors missed entirely when they checked him over, and a great deal of bruising all over that is only just greening and fading. He's damaged, but so fierce in defense of his larger partner. And behind him, Duke gasping helplessly for air and reaching out to grab hold of the back of Jimmy's shirt. At the end of it all, the only thing he wants is to be touching his boyfriend.

Butcher takes one ponderous step back, turning sidewise to cease blocking the overgrown logging road. He gestures with the chain hook, from the two boys on up the weedy track they were following. "Go," he says.

Maybe it is a nothing but whim, because Butcher sees in them an echo of himself and Hayseed. Maybe it is simply that Jimmy and Duke are both in that odd age where they were neither the summoner's despised peers nor the authority figures they felt failed them. They were nonentities to Belial and Mara and Leonard, and so not specifically targeted for the wide-cast net of their revenge.

Whatever the reason, Jimmy does not hesitate. He drops the stick and pulls Duke's arm up over his narrow shoulders. It is a titanic effort from them both that gets Duke back up on his feet, and gets them moving. They shuffle their slow and careful way past Butcher, the charnel-stench of the demon thick enough in the air to taste.

As they pass him by, Hayseed pops up and worms his way under one of Butcher's arms. His firey goggled eyes spin wildly. "Don't look back!" he sing-songs, and howls laughter through his stitched-shut burlap mouth.

Jimmy and Duke walk, one step after another in the dark as their hometown burns behind them. And this story is not a kind one, but it is not the story of Lot's wife. It is not the story of Orpheus. Duke can barely see what's in _front_ of him, and Jimmy fixes his gaze forward and makes of himself the best damn crutch he can be. They do not stop, and they do not look back.

When the sun rises on the First of November, they stumble, traumatized and exhausted, into a world that has not burned down.

Jimmy and Duke escape, and they will carry the terrible story in their bones and in their bellies for the rest of their lives.

How else are Hayseed and Butcher to spread their reputation and influence?


	11. Epilogue

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> the sun rises

Hallowe'en night is long and brutal, but the world still turns. The sun will eventually rise on the First of November, with the first streaks of its light to end the month of October.

There is no one living left in the doomed town to see it.

There is a towering pile of bodies collected like trophies at the geographic center of the town. A body is mostly water, but these burn hot, with no fuel, in defiance of mortal physics. Atop the heap, the two familiar figures of the demons are wrapped up in each other.

Butcher is reclining in a decadent sprawl on the throne of bodies, and Hayseed straddles him in the flames. They bite at each other's faces—Butcher's sharp teeth ripping at the burlap of Hayseed's mouth, and Hayseed's furnace heat scorching the thinner points of Butcher's teeth to ash. They move together, their vessels pressed close and close and still terribly far apart with the limits that bind them in their physical bodies.

Butcher holds Hayseed's thin torso between both big hands, and achingly desperate to get closer, he presses one thick thumb into the center of the spiderweb-crack left behind by Mara's rune of destruction. Feeding greater destruction power into it is easy, and Hayseed's chest cracks and crumbles beneath the force with a popping crunch of broken bone and cartilage. Hayseed wails like a banshee and thrusts his body forward into it as Butcher pushes his thumb into the core of his vessel. It spears into him, nestled against the wild-beating scorched rabbit that still powers him. Ash-tainted blood, searing-hot and thick with chaos magic, drips down Butcher's hand and wrist.

Hayseed drags both hands down Butcher's wide chest. The blackened nails of his flesh hand grow into wicked curved claws, and his metal fingers are tipped with razors. He scores ten bleeding lines down Butcher's body, digging into his thick flesh to try and get at the core of him. Where Hayseed's chaos infused blood drips onto Butcher's, where the potent powers of chaos and destruction escape their vessels to meet and mingle, they burn in dancing flames of profane inverted light.

It is contact, a bare hint of a touch when they have been a month apart, and not nearly enough. White ash drifts slowly down over them from all the fires that still burn, and the eastern sky is beginning to brighten from the color of drying blood toward gold.

Butcher sinks his sharp fangs into Hayseed's shoulder, breaking through thin ash-smeared skin and bones alike. He swallows a mouthful of blistering blood, and it burns all the way down. Hayseed is already peeling a strip of flayed flesh off of Butcher's bones to stuff into his insatiable mouth.

With their power in each other's vessels, the destruction accelerates. Faster and faster, as the day approaches, they tear at each other. Flexing his chaos within Butcher's vessel, Hayseed lights an inferno in his belly, eating him up from the inside. The cracks in Hayseed's chest widen, spreading up and down his vessel until he is lit in shattered lines of fire from toe to tip.

"C'mon, c'mon, c'mon!" Hayseed urges, frantic. He hooks his fingers up under Butcher's sternum, tearing at it from the inside with his whole hand engulfed in warm organs and the fast-spreading heat of his own fire. Butcher's guts slither soft and wet over his lap, and it isn't _enough_.

Butcher _purrs_ as he pushes his second thumb into Hayseed's damaged chest along with the first. Hayseed's blood spurts out onto him in fevered pulses, blackened rabbit heart exposed. The profane flames flare up, terrible and blinding.

As the sun rises, as the first golden spear of light strikes out to illuminate the peak of the pile of bodies and end the night of the demon's power, Butcher yanks his hands apart to rip Hayseed's vessel clear in two.

The light strengthens, and the demons are gone. At the top of the gruesome pile there are just a few scattered remnants of an old straw-stuffed scarecrow, and the mangled body of a human boy.

Far from the mortal plane, two beings who are no longer bound to the names of 'Hayseed' and 'Butcher', no longer limited to physical bodies, interlace and intertwine in fierce joy. A Lord of Destruction grapples a Lord of Chaos, and is grappled in turn. They share every part of themselves, intermeshed and exultant. Strength for strength and energy for energy, they know each other, complementary and catastrophic.

The sharp spear of the being that was Hayseed pierces clear through Butcher, spinning through and around him. His chaos excites the other's energies, lending him quickness and momentum that he could not claim alone. The thundering potential of the being that was Butcher envelops Hayseed, cradling and crushing both. His destruction adds potency to the other's chaos, providing drive and direction that they may use themselves to greatest effect. They are of each other and in each other, and nothing can pry them apart.

They return to the place that birthed them stronger than ever. They have taken another massive leap up the ranks of the damned in their unstoppable meteoric rise. There will be raging battles as they reestablish themselves, for the moment they do not care. They know there's nothing they can't take on together. They care only that finally, finally, they can stand together again. Everything else is just details.

Home is familiar, and it's a familiar game. They'll hold their place with every bit of viciousness and cruelty they've got.

Until the next time some fool offers them the sliver of a chance, and they rise again.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> FIN
> 
> Thank you for reading!  
> Please drop a comment if you can, it would mean a lot to me <3


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